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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (89233)	12/4/2004 12:08:31 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793974

I think we would be better off with the Telecoms as common carriers. Interesting case. Supreme Court to Hear Case on Cable as Internet Carrier By LINDA GREENHOUSE - NYT ASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - The Supreme Court on Friday stepped into one of the most heated debates over the future of the Internet: how to classify high-speed Internet cable service for purposes of federal regulation and, ultimately, for the question of whether competing Internet service providers are entitled to use the cable companies' networks to reach their subscribers. The justices accepted appeals filed by the Bush administration and the cable industry from a federal appeals court decision that struck down large portions of a deregulatory order issued by the Federal Communications Commission in 2002. The order freed companies that provide cable modem service of the obligation that federal law places on providers of "telecommunications services" to open their networks to their competitors. The F.C.C. had decided after two years of study that broadband cable service was an "information service" and not a "telecommunications service" - categories that in the commission's view are mutually exclusive under the 1996 Telecommunications Act. By placing cable on the "information" side, the commission freed it from the obligations the law places on carriers like traditional phone companies, which must permit interconnection with other carriers. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit disagreed, ruling last year that cable broadband service was a hybrid that could not be freed by administrative decree from its common-carrier obligations. An initial question in the Supreme Court appeals is whether, regardless of the merits of the dispute, the appeals court should have given greater deference to the views of the F.C.C. If the justices' answer is yes, the court might simply send the case back to the Ninth Circuit for reconsideration under a more deferential standard of review. That would postpone a judicial resolution. The interest is intense among all segments of the telecommunications industry. Although the cable and phone companies are competitors for broadband services, with cable having about 60 percent of the residential broadband market, they are on the same side in this dispute because the phone companies expect that they will be the next to benefit from the deregulatory mood at the F.C.C. The phone companies are still regulated as common carriers in their provision of digital subscriber line service and are required to offer their transmission capacity to unaffiliated Internet service providers. Verizon Communications, BellSouth and SBC Communications all told the justices in friend-of-the-court briefs that it was essential to resolve the regulatory framework so that phone companies could continue to invest in the next generation of broadband networks. On the other side are independent Internet service providers like Earthlink and Brand X Internet Services, the small California Internet provider that was among the initial challengers to the F.C.C. order. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

To: LindyBill who wrote (89233)	12/4/2004 1:27:41 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793974

This would certainly change things ...Fast! Flying Cars .. Forbes~: Honda Takes to the Skies Benjamin Fulford and Patricia Huang, 11.15.04 forbes.com Is there a flying car in your future? Honda Motor President Takeo Fukui, when he's not fixated on selling the world more Civics and Accords, dreams about airplanes for the masses. It's a dream his predecessors had quietly and carefully tended since founder Soichiro Honda spoke of his ambition to build an aircraft in the early 1960s. Now, at last, the dream is taking shape. Without much fanfare Honda has built a remarkably efficient jet engine and ultralight airframe that could be put together to make a personal airplane. It would be the biggest revolution in travel since the commercial jet. A flying car in every garage? For the moment, a bit laughable. But already some of the keenest minds in the airline business are thinking about miniaturizing aviation. Witness the air-taxi firm being put together by Robert Crandall and Donald Burr. Also note that United Technologies' Pratt & Whitney and Williams International are planning to sell tiny turbofan engines to such airplanemakers as Adam Aircraft, Eclipse Aviation, Diamond Aircraft and Cessna. Their planes cost around $2 million. Now Honda, in much the same way it ambushed U.S. carmakers in the 1970s with cheap and efficient autos, is aiming to take a big piece of the microaviation market. It has designed a turbofan engine that weighs only 392 pounds and delivers 1,600 pounds of thrust. Attached to an experimental HondaJet body, the engine powers a six-seat jet with 40% better fuel efficiency (in nautical miles per pound of fuel) than similar jets now on the market. Thriftier engines, cheaper cockpit computers and lighter planes could lower a jet's per-mile operating cost (which includes maintenance, insurance and storage) from $4 to $1.50, says Bruce Holmes, who oversees aerospace innovations at the U.S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration research center in Hampton, Virginia. Just as the automobile created the suburbs, personal flying machines could create meta-urbs, with lakeside acres replacing cramped condominiums. If people can buy a house far from the city for, say, $400,000 and fly to work, instead of paying $1.2 million for a house within driving distance to the city, a private plane begins to make sense. "Take a look at those horrible traffic jams in L.A. Wouldn't you rather live outside the city and fly to work?" asks Honda's Fukui. The engine is scheduled to hit the market by 2007 at $300,000. Honda has formed a joint venture in Cincinnati, Ohio with General Electric to market and support its engines. GE is helping Honda through the safety testing required for U.S. Federal Aviation Administration certification--including the bird strike test, in which four-pound euthanized seagulls are sucked into the engine to see if it can take the punishment a real flock can inflict. The GE-Honda venture is already in talks with airframe manufacturers, including Brazil's Embraer and three other firms. "GE is very impressed with the careful and methodical approach Honda has taken, focused on affordability, light weight, fuel efficiency, reliability and low cost of ownership," says David Calhoun, head of GE Transportation, which makes its own aircraft engines. "Now we need to change it from lab product to mass-produced item." John Wright, vice president of business aviation for Pratt & Whitney, says, "We've been in the turbine business for 40 years and have tremendous aftermarket support, and that's what operators are going to be looking for. But I don't take competition lightly." Honda, however, is looking beyond engines. Though company officials say they have no current plan to market the HondaJet, it seems unlikely that Honda bothered to design and build its own airframe merely to test an engine. "If they wanted to fly an engine, they could have just used an existing airframe," says Vern Raburn, chief executive of Eclipse Aviation, one of the first producers of a very light minijet. 1 of 2 Next > Page 2 of 2 from Honda Takes to the Skies Benjamin Fulford and Patricia Huang, 11.15.04 For the first few years Honda is likely to sell only a few hundred engines, a pittance compared with the 400,000 Accords it sells each year in North America. In the early going the main benefit from the air business may well be the extra polish it adds to the Honda brand. But Fukui, 60, promises that Honda will make this small business into a giant one. Since he was a child he has dreamed of a world with personal aircraft costing the same as today's luxury car models. His two predecessors, both aeronautical engineers, shared that dream, but it may come true in his lifetime. Honda's aviation roots go back to the aftermath of World War II, when U.S. occupation forces prohibited Japan from further developing its aircraft industry. "Most technicians who developed the Zero fighter plane went to work for the automobile industry," says Fukui. Honda hired many aerospace engineers from universities, offering them the chance to continue pursuing their dream of aircraft development, even if only as an R&D project. In the 1960s Japan's Ministry of International Trade & Industry launched a project to develop a commercial aircraft. It was a spectacular flop. MITI also discouraged Honda, then mostly a motorcycle maker, from getting into the automobile business, in order to protect existing carmakers. Honda plunged into the business anyway and kept up some aviation research on the side. For decades it has spent an undisclosed chunk of its $400 million basic research budget on aviation. Once this new engine is certified, we can expect continual, radical improvements to small aircraft flight. Honda's research into sensors that can read and follow the center lines of roads, ultrahigh definition radar systems and crash-prevention technology will help reduce the glaring risk of novice pilots crashing all around us. A lot of work still needs to be done in cleaning jet emissions and overhauling traffic control systems for the increased volume of ultralights. Small airports need to be upgraded, too. But the visionaries at NASAexpect to see, 30 years from now, a small, two- to seven-seat flying machine that you will be able to drive at 25mph to a football-field-size airfield before taking off. "What we are doing now," says Fukui, "is a step toward that dream." The Little Engine That Could Honda's turbofan will power future ultralight jets. Here's how it compares with some other engines. Takeoff thrust (lbs) Normal cruise speed (mph) Max range in miles Boeing 777-300ER Powered by: General Electric GE90-115B 115,000 640 9,100 Airbus A330-200 Powered by: Pratt & Whitney PW4168A 68,000 632 7,600 Gulfstream G550 Powered by: Rolls-Royce BR710 15,000 647 7,800 HondaJet Powered by: GE Honda Aero HF 118 1,600 480* 1,300 * Per engine. ** High-speed cruise speed. Source: Companies.

To: LindyBill who wrote (89233)	12/4/2004 3:04:58 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793974

We have stuck them. Actually, they've stuck themselves. The point of exporting is to get imports. They don't buy enough imports from the US to use up more of their US dollars. It's not totally blindness on the part of the Chinese because their domestic price level isn't high enough to buy US produced stuff, yet. The Japanese, on the other hand, can afford it but don't do it. Plus, of course, the US economy is so big that there's no way either country can achieve even balance of trade with the US. The aim of the Bush administration is obviously to grow the US economy so much that government revenues will overtake debt and deficit thus putting the fiscal house in order. It's very likely this can be done. In the meantime the export driven prosperity in those countries comes at the cost of holding US dollars. The natural state of affairs is that the US dollar will revalue lower with respect to Chinese and Japanese currencies since US businesses are buying them at a greater rate then those countries' businesses are buying US dollars. The Chinese and Japanese want to escape the consequences of this: lower profits and possibly falling exports to the US as prices of their products rise there. And, of course, greater competition from US products due to lower dollar. They want to escape the business cycle or at least, the import export cycle. Among countries that are accumulating dollars - especially China - grumbling is on the rise that Washington should do more to protect the value of their investments by cutting the budget deficit and adopting other policies to slow or reverse the dollar's decline. "Shouldn't the relevant authorities be doing something about this?" asked Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China at a conference in Laos last Sunday. Be careful what you wish for. There's hardly any US inflation, so Greenspan hasn't been growing the money supply too quickly, and as far as I can tell, has been letting the markets deal with interest rates. Government deficits and debts aren't a huge problem if debt holders have confidence they can be serviced. So far the US has had a good record doing this in modern times by growing itself out of the debt. Something is going to be done which might give PM Wen an answer to his question. Social Security reform might raise the US savings rate a little but will likely lead some of those savings into more productive investments thus increasing US prosperity.... As far as I can tell the world is unfolding as it should. I'm positive that if I'm wrong about this someone will be happy to correct me.